Brookings Loonies

Their report on transit performance ranks Silicon Valley as #3 in the nation for what they term “transit access” — even better than New York City. They also rank the Valley’s sprawling office parks as #3 in the nation for transit-accessible employment.

Silicon Valley, I must point out, has a whopping 3.5% transit mode-share.

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The Brookings people are looking at the number of jobs accessible, instead of just looking at residential proximity to transit the way most access studies do. It’s a very different way of looking at transit access, and it’s a pretty important step in understanding transit service quality. They use a very generous measure–a 90 minute commute–so that, combined with turning the typical accessibility around, means they are going to find some things that shake people up.

I mean, dear God, do we need another transit study that slobbers about New York? We’ve only been doing that for last 50 years.

And by looking at access according to jobs, New York as a region has some pretty inaccessible job locations. One of my students, for example, lived in Queens (yes, there is more to New York than Manhattan) and she had 2.5 hour, two-transfer bus/subway/bus ride to her job. If the job maps of the New York region are any indicator, that’s not a man bites dog story.

And accessibility doesn’t mean mode share. Good transit access doesn’t automatically mean you’ll take transit. It’s possible to have both good transit and good car access–and that the car access is even better than the transit access.

So the study finds that if you were to take transit in Silicon Valley, you’d be able to get to a fair number of jobs that way, that’s all. It’s just a transit and job supply measure.

First, larger cities have longer commutes, independently of everything else. The average one-way commute in Tokyo is an hour or more; by the Brookings methodology, it would be less transit-accessible than San Jose.

Second, the quality of transit matters. If the streets are pedestrian-hostile arterials without sidewalks, if employment is concentrated in office parks surrounded by gobs of parking, and if the bus/rail connections are unreliable, people are not going to take transit for 90 minutes.

What Brookings proved is that the share of jobs within 90-minute radius of transit is an irrelevant measure for the quality of transit.